William Watson: Montreal commuters want a new Champlain Bridge, as long as they don’t have to pay for it

Montreal commuters want a new Champlain Bridge, as long as they don’t have to pay for it

In fairy tales, trolls live under bridges. In Montreal, they live at the ends of bridges. Montreal’s trolls are toll trolls. They’re very grateful to the federal government for finally saying yes to a new Champlain Bridge — which rumour has it may ultimately be called the Pont Rocket Richard, or maybe the Pont Carey Price or Pont P. K. Subban if this year’s Habs keep winning — but gratitude for the new bridge, which will cost $1.5-billion to $5-billion, lasted all of about three weeks and has now been gobbled up by anger over Ottawa’s stubborn insistence (that guy Harper, you know) that the new bridge will be financed and maintained in part by tolls.

All the familiar tools of orchestrated outrage are being used: petitions, demonstrations, marches, sob stories in the media, extortionist lobbying of the provincial and federal governments by local politicians, including the new mayor of Montreal, himself a former federal Liberal cabinet minister.

People against bridge tolls offer many justifications, of course, but those most adamantly opposed are, as might be expected, current users of the old bridge. Thus many residents of the South Shore are brought before the media with stories of how their life will be made miserable if they have to pay a bridge toll. What is their fundamental objection to tolls? “I don’t want to pay.” They don’t actually say somebody else should pay. But that’s the unavoidable subtext: “I don’t want to pay. Somebody else should pay.”

In the first volume of the authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher, Charles Moore reminds us that “Critics of the Thatcher administrations who allege that they promoted selfishness tend not to recall that it was a revulsion against selfishness — in the form of arbitrary union power — which brought Mrs. Thatcher into office in the first place.”

The toll trolls aren’t a union. But they’re becoming a movement. And though they dress up their motivation in fancy conceptual garb, about which more in a minute, it’s clear to anyone who isn’t a regular user of the bridge that their main motivation is self-interest. And as with the bolshy British unions of the 1970s the resulting reaction is revulsion.

Naturally they don’t want to pay. Who wants to pay for anything if, without too much investment in political action, they can force somebody else to pay? In Quebec we learned that from our kids, who wanted somebody else to pay for the university that will raise their lifetime earnings by hundreds of thousands of dollars, and got away with it.

But how is it either fair or efficient that bridge users don’t pay for the bridge?

The reason we’re having to build a new bridge, well before the old one’s time, is that budget-driven neglected maintenance has left the old one in danger of falling down. The only way to be sure the same thing doesn’t happen to the new bridge is to have a dedicated source of revenue and then work like the dickens to keep it from being plundered.

Beyond that, if we want people to make the right transport choices, shouldn’t we confront them with the costs of those different choices? Building and maintaining bridges is part of the cost of living on the South Shore and commuting. People who want to commute should face that cost. If they find the cost too high, maybe they’ll decide to live closer to their job.

Because “I don’t want to pay, you pay for me instead” isn’t a political winner, the toll trolls are arguing that their opposition to tolls is mainly altruistic. Thus if the Pont Rocket has tolls but Montreal’s other bridges don’t, traffic will move to these other bridges, worsening congestion on them.

Note that what the toll trolls are saying is that people do respond to economic incentives. And that underpricing bridges causes greater bridge use. The solution is obvious: We need tolls for all Montreal’s bridges. Once we get people to pay for the bridges, we can then think about whether there should be additional charges, maybe only at peak hours, to discourage traffic congestion.

As would be expected, the trolls also cloak themselves in the language of economic growth. The new bridge is a crucial highway for commerce. Charging tolls will divert economic activity away from Montreal. And so on. But of course that argument is specious. We don’t want economic activity that’s subsidized. And if it depends for its existence on giving away costly bridge services, it’s subsidized.

These same attitudes are infecting decision-making about new light rail systems in Ottawa and Toronto, for which all means of finance are being considered except the one that makes the most obvious sense: cost-recovering user charges.

And the selfishness it all exemplifies is causing sclerosis in our economy.

NIMBY. Not in my backyard. Not in my front yard, either. Not down the block. Not around the corner. Not even on the other side of town. No, no, no. If there’s any inconvenience or cost to me, even the slightest, I don’t want any part of it, no matter what it is.

Though the technology is now standard and the geography well explored, getting to Yes on oil pipelines, whether to Houston or the B. C. coast, is verging on having taken as long as building the CPR.

Worry for our country. If John A. Macdonald had had to deal with the kinds of trolls politicians have to wrestle with today, we’d all be speaking American now.

Letters to the editor

Please include your address and daytime telephone number. We give preference to letters that refer to a particular article by headline, author and date.

If your letter concerns articles in other sections of the National Post, including business articles that appear in the A section, please send your letter here.

Copyright in letters and other materials sent to the publisher and accepted for publication remains with the author, but the publisher and its licensees may freely reproduce them in print, electronic and other forms.